Over the past 50 years, the U.S. and several European labor markets have undergone two most incisive developments: job market polarization and deunionization. In this paper, we argue that routine-biased technical change is not only the driving force behind polarization, as prevalently assumed,...

Using the German IAB Job Vacancy Survey, we look into the black box of recruiting intensity and hiring practices from the employers' perspective. Our paper evaluates three important channels for hiring -namely vacancy posting, the selectivity of hiring (labor selection), and the number of search...

The role of the accumulation of human capital to per capita income growth has been sharply debated among economists and policy makers. One open question of this debate is how to measure human capital. The standard approach is to use the average years of education of the labour force or the...

In Germany, there is no trade union membership wage premium, while the membership fee amounts to 1% of the gross wage. Therefore, prima facie, there are strong incentives to free-ride on the benefits of trade unionism. We establish empirical evidence for a private gain from trade union...

Redistributive taxation and education subsidies are common policies intended to foster education attendance of poor children. However, this paper shows that in an intergenerational framework, these policies can raise social mobility only for some investment situations but not in general. I also...

Social mobility is a key element of meritocratic societies. We analyze multigenerational social mobility with a hand-collected yearly Swiss dataset from 1550 to 2019. With our surname-based approach, we measure the Swiss society's overall permeability over more than 450 years. Furthermore, we...

The empirical evidence on the incidence of payroll taxation is primarily based on the wage bill of firms. This paper applies matched employer-employee register data on individual wages for all private sector workers in Norway. Exploiting a payroll tax reform and using the...

Blood donation with compensation is considered as a social stigma. However, more people in the reference group donate blood often leads to less moral concern and more followers. Therefore, the behavior is likely to be influenced through one's interactions with neighbors, friends and relatives....

Differences in life expectancy between high and low socioeconomic groups are often large and have widened recently in many countries. Such longevity gaps affect the actuarial fairness and progressivity of public pension systems. However, behavioral responses to longevity and policy complicate...

This paper examines the impact of education and labour market challenges on the income inequality in European Union (27 Member States) within the period 2012-2022, this being calculated using the Panel EGLS method. Even if the effects are clearly visible from a theoretical point of view, in the...